SteveH wrote:That is awesome. Why not just use a laser though ?
In fact, there is a company that makes a laser scan turntable. The name of the company is ELP:
http://www.elpj.com/
The technology was developed perhaps as much as 20 years ago and I assume that it's relatively robust. However, for an organization like the Library of Congress I suspect that the results that they achieve are better than the ELP device, while producing a much more flexible system.
First, I presume that when the article says a "camera linked to a computer" they actually mean a white-light scanning device or, as you suggested, a laser scanner that acquires the entire record side nearly instantaneously rather than a "laser stylus" like the ELP. These scanning techniques are the same exact tools that are used in industry to reverse engineer designs; inspect manufactured part accuracy, etc, etc.
The beauty of this application is that these guys are using well developed and continually maturing technology (light scanning hardware) on the front end, and then developing the software that takes the raw data (usually an STL file) and extracting an audio track that they can repair and clean up in a method perhaps superior to even the best audio editing tools (like ProTools, etc).
For now, I'll stick with old school mechanical reproduction. I am pleased to see a portion of my tax dollars funding something like this, though.
drew*